Not all who wander are lost, especially not writers. In fact, I’d like to think most of our ideas come to us while we’re wandering, physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever. Either way, I’m convinced that having no direction isn’t a very big problem.

I’m not a published novelist or anything, but the process of writing a book in my experience, telling a tale, is a hell of a lot more aimless than I thought. As I sat down to write last night, I felt like a lonely wanderer.  It had been so long (my novel and I were honeymooning for a day or two after I married him) that I nearly forgot where I was going with it. I did, in fact. I had a few vague ideas of what I wanted it to be about and what I wanted to happen. You know, the big things that gave me the idea to write it in the first place. But I’m still beginning, so when I sat down to continue, I was completely lost on what was going to happen next. How in the hell was I going to make the big things I wanted to happen, happen?

It’s a slow process, and details need to be fleshed out. The story needs to build, gain momentum, and skyrocket into space during those big moments. Characters need to be introduced, their faces, their quirks. How that’s going to happen I have no idea. But I’ll tell you what I do have, and that’s faith. I have faith that the more time I spend with the story I want to tell, the more it will tell itself. I’ve seen it happen in my short stories, even in my poems. Even in book reviews I’ve written. I never know quite what I want to say until I really get going, and then it just goes off like a bomb in my head and I’m writing it all down, flayed body parts and everything. I ache to detonate.

Marriages and novel writing have exactly 534,021 things in common, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll stick to my favorite: dedication. This relationship I have no problem dedicating to, because my novel will give me one thing in the end, as far as I’m concerned, and that is relief.

I’ve said more than a few ti`mes on this blog that writing is therapeutic for me. If I were writing to sell, I’d be up to my ears in rejection letters because it’d all be crap. That’s not to say that I’m not already up to my nose hairs in rejection letters of course, but you get the idea. When you think of it as a job, it comes out forced and smelling like month old milk. Sometimes though, when you’re writing for yourself, there are a few lines that might come out like a beautiful newborn, and you’re satisfied with them because they hit home. At least for you. Therein lies my own relief, because for that small measure of time when I wrote those few lines, I healed a bit.

Back to the matter at hand. Dedication. That is what novels require, and until now I have been spitting out excuse after excuse as to why I’m not dedicating myself to this relationship. Where real life relationships are concerned, I’ve got bruises and scars all over those hard to reach places, and I’m tired of wanting to be wanted. Real life people are never where you want them to be, when you want them to be. So maybe this move is selfish, but maybe it’s time to be. Sometimes the cure for loneliness is substituting whatever’s making you lonely with something that fills you up.

So I’m marrying my work.

I’ve decided to step into a new relationship with a man who I can spend as much time as I want with, who I can talk to at all hours of the night, who I can wake up with and dote upon. Essentially, someone who will always be there when I want him. Someone who will never let me down. Okay some of that is balderdash. I’ve been let down plenty by this novel fellow because sometimes he gets real quiet and it’s hard to get him to sing.

But he’s cute and on time, and I’m willing to make this work.

Everyone has an idol they aspire to be like, or someone they mentally call upon when they’re striving to be someone better. When you think of that someone, you are more disciplined, clear headed, and less likely to give up at the first road block.

For me, that idol is Lady Gaga. No, I am not an early twenty-something glorifying someone I do not know. Personally I find it hard to follow the whole “Mother Monster” movement, and even think it’s a bit weird.

I think of Lady Gaga as someone who plays pretend. Someone who puts on a show, who gets up every morning and gets to play “dress-up”. Someone who gets to put on pretty dresses, wear fancy wigs, be anyone but who she really is, if only for those shining moments under the bright lights. But that’s what makes her great. She gets to prance around half naked, glorified for playing a part in a fantasy world. Her fantasy world. And she’s damn good at it. In fact, it’s made her a millionaire.

So tonight I get home from work, feel a little bitter about writing a review for a book I didn’t quite understand, and all around troubled for not feeling motivated to do anything productive. I feel weary. Tired. Worn. My boss even told me I looked forlorn today. Not in the mood for a damn thing. It was like a scene out of some movie about drug addiction, only my addiction was to doing absolutely nothing with my time. And I was dying slowly. It was treacherous.

So I took a little nap, and when I woke up, I felt refreshed. I went to my desk chair, threw a scarf around my neck, put on a sun hat (the big floppy ones you wear at the beach) and started pretending to smoke a cigarette with a pen. I pretended to be Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Audrey Hepburn, anyone but who I actually was. I was bored with who I was. She wasn’t getting anything done. She was sitting around, feeling sorry for herself.  I plucked out a little Chinese fan I got as a gift awhile back, and started fanning myself, pretending to be rich and famous in some glorious mansion somewhere where all the other mansions live. I opened Microsoft Word and started typing away, as though I was some mad genius, and the words kept coming and coming and coming UNTIL…they weren’t even mine anymore. They were this woman’s, whoever this woman was that I was pretending to be, some superior woman that absolutely wasn’t me.

I was pretending, like a little kid. All this time I was pretending and I could hear my roommate downstairs, and I chuckled to myself, thinking how much he would worry about my sanity if he found me pounding away at the keys with a fake pen cigarette in one hand, and a beach hat sitting lopsided on top of my head. Not to mention a Chinese fan in my lap and a scarf wrapped around my neck, all the way up to my nose.

Call me crazy, but you have to get outside of yourself to write. You can’t write characters that are like yourself, that’s boring. No one cares about you or what happens in your life. You already know this. Sure you intersperse TONS of things about your life in the narrative, but ultimately it’s about what the characters experience, and how fucked up you can make those experiences. I love torturing my characters. Not in a physical way, but messing with their heads, inflicting all kinds of unnecessary drama on them so the reader squirms. Because as a reader, I like to squirm. As a Breaking Bad fan, I like to have my blood pressure spike a little bit while experiencing a pretend world.

Many writers know just how to get outside themselves without the whole hat and scarf ordeal, and no, I won’t throw on a hat and scarf every time I sit down to write. But it is more fun. And it does make you feel young. And admit it, you miss it playing pretend.

You know that point when you’re puttering along, writing your novel, and you get stuck? You can’t decide what this character should say next. You can’t figure out where this scene should go, or what dilemma to present. Some people like to call that writer’s block, I just call  it my stopping point.  I truck along elsewhere, I do laundry, I take a nap, I try to get around to finishing that review for that one book. I read. I don’t really let it get to me, because I know that the next scene or scrap of dialogue will present itself to me eventually. It always does.

I was on Twitter earlier, looking up all the tweets under the hash tag #firstworldproblems. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, you should be, because that is where your characters are just waiting to be born. And I’m talking more than just 140 of them.

This got me thinking of all of the places I randomly steal snippets of dialogue, facial expressions, and weird people-isms for my writing. If you’re stumped on ideas of where to go next in your novel, considering it’s NaNoWriMo and all, here are a few really unique places I find them.

1. Twitter. It depends on what kind of character you’re looking for, but if you’re looking to write a funny, sort of shallow character, type in the hash tag #firstworldproblems in Twitter search, and let the character write itself. In scrolling through the tweets from the hash tag #firstworldproblems, you get a lot of shallow people basically making fun of themselves. If you’re not familiar, consider this tweet. And this was the one that gave me the idea for this post.

“My cleaning lady hasn’t texted me back yet. WTF! #firstworldproblems.”

If a character in a novel said this, I would crack up. I would just die. These are the characters I love. They are kooky and sort of shallow, interesting and good natured. These are the kinds of things you could use as character dialogue because they are real and relatable. Admit it, even though it’s fiction, we all love characters that are real and relatable.

Also, try reading a few bios on Twitter. They’re short, but they are great starting point for developing character background. For instance, I read one bio earlier that read “Motorcyclist, Robot-fighter, writer, living in Brooklyn.” What are you waiting for?

2.  Post Secret. We’ve all heard of Post Secret by now. People send in their secrets, a few people publish them in a book. Aside from the heart wrenching experience it is to look through all of those secrets, it really is a great place to find ideas. One secret can make an entire character. I read this one about this woman who would write love letters to men and stick them in various mail boxes, so their wives would think they were having an affair. That’s a story just waiting to be told.

3. Texts From Last Night. There’s a wonderfully dirty website out there that it’s okay to be caught looking at called TextsFromLastNight.com. It’s powerfully hilarious. Look at any of the texts people send each other there, and you are automatically forming stories from them about the night before. And you weren’t even there.

4. Trashcans. Specifically, other people’s. The other day I went into a friend’s bathroom and saw the following: the box for a pregnancy test, rubber bands, and an empty duct tape roll. I’m not talking digging in there, but just a glance inside the occasional trash can once in awhile. There’s bound the to be an odd combination of items that might get your juices flowing.

I’ll have you know that I am ever-discovering new ways to keep myself amused, and in so doing, fiction is found. This list may grow as long as your hair, in which case I’ll either edit, or post anew. Stay tuned, and good luck.